After the 2010 general election, few would have believed that we would be going into the next election with both an implementation date for reform of care funding in England, and £1bn of funding earmarked by the Treasury.

While the financial and demographic squeeze on adult social services departments means that the care system continues to be a place of significant stress and pressure, the fact that the reform agenda persists at all is a remarkable outcome. However, with the implementation date for reform less than three years away, many people are facing up to the fact that the "capped cost" reforms are unlikely to achieve any of their objectives.

Most people now recognise that the "cap" is not a cap, because of the differences between what self-funders and local authorities pay for care. Despite the highly trumpeted increase in the "upper capital limit" means test threshold for residential care to £118,000, it is now clear that on average the "real" effective threshold for council support is more likely to be around £80,000 for self-funders and, because of variations in usual cost rates among councils, there will in fact be 152 different real upper capital limits.

It is now widely accepted that we are very unlikely to see any emergence of a pre-funded insurance market in response to the cap, not least because the £72,000 that individuals are meant to take responsibility for is in fact uninsurable from an actuarial standpoint. There also remain serious uncertainties around how much peace of mind will be bestowed on the population by the reforms, not least because the £72,000 cap will be uprated annually by around £3,000 per year from 2016, which is far more than most households manage to save each year.

In this context, the choice for policymakers and social care stakeholders is either to shrug their shoulders or set about trying to fix the "bugs" in the reforms, so that the changes implemented in April 2016 are the best they possibly can be. To this end, the Strategic Society Centre has published a detailed analysis of the shortcomings in the government's plans, and the options for improvement.

For example, in addition to the cap, introducing a static "years of care" cut-off period for residential care beyond which individuals would receive the usual cost rate from their local authority, would be the same for self-funders across the country and would remain the same over time, unlike the planned cap. Perhaps most radically, we recommend withdrawing homecare from the reforms, given determination from all sides to drive the integration of health and care funding, commissioning and provision.

In this context, the capped cost reforms risk isolating social care from the rest of the care pathway, and could be a block on the most radical, potentially effective models of integrated care that dissolve away formal notions of "social care". Alternative mechanisms for capping people's integrated homecare costs are available, not least the existing weekly cap on charges in operation in Wales.

But more importantly than anything else, it is vital that the government is honest with the public, does not oversell the reforms and seeks to close the perception gap that has emerged around the benefits of the changes for individuals and families. A backlash against the care system during the next parliament, fuelled by disappointment and dismay about what the reforms mean in practice, is in no one's interest.

James Lloyd is director of the Strategic Society Centre. The Centre's new report, A Cap that Fits, can be downloaded from strategicsociety.org.uk